


The Return of Donna Noble

by Selenay



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-24
Updated: 2008-02-24
Packaged: 2017-10-03 09:45:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selenay/pseuds/Selenay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After her adventure with the Doctor, Donna did exactly what she said she would. She went down to the travel agent's, bought a round the world ticket and travelled. It turns out that no matter where you travel to, some things are universal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Return of Donna Noble

As Donna dodged a laser bolt and ran in the direction of the exit, elbowing away the stupid people who seemed intent on running in circles, she reflected that it might actually have been safer to take the Doctor up on his offer. After all, she'd still be facing laser fire regularly but at least he would have been running towards the aliens and making them stop.

Somehow.

The exit from the bar shone whitely through the smoke, promising salvation if she could just get there. Nobody seemed to know what to do about the aliens intent on slaughtering everyone, they were just running around pointlessly and screaming. Most of them didn't even seem to know where the exit was. Donna did and she was starting to get angry at having to shove, pummel and kick her way through the crowd, constantly buffeted away from the exit no matter how hard she tried.

When she had refused the Doctor's offer of a trip in the TARDIS, it had seemed like a sensible, rational decision. She would take her savings down to the travel agent's, buy herself a round the world ticket and start seeing something. No more holiday resorts with English pubs and Chinese take-outs on every corner and barely a word of the local language heard. This would be her chance to actually experience something.

Fourteen months later and Donna was starting to suspect that spending any time with the Doctor cursed a person to find aliens wherever they went. There had been the big green things in Prague, the robots in Beijing, the tiny furry things with huge teeth in Singapore - the blood hadn't washed out of her clothes and she'd been forced to throw away her favourite jeans - and now massive, armoured grey aliens with bloody huge laser guns in Ottawa, of all places.

Whoever started the rumour about polite Canadians had obviously never met Canadians faced with lasers. There had been better behaviour at her not-wedding in Chiswick.

Something punched Donna in the kidneys hard enough to wind her. The shock of it was enough to stall her for a few crucial moments and she was almost swept off her feet by a surge in the desperate mob. Scrambling and clawing at shoulders and arms around her kept Donna on her feet, but she lost several feet of hard won territory and there was no way that she was getting to the door through such a panicked, crazy, half-drunk crowd.

She thought a mental "sod it" and began to push her way towards the bar. It was much easier going than trying to get to the door, even with throbs of pain from what were sure to be beautiful bruises, and she hoisted herself up and over the bar without difficulty. The heat from a laser bolt scorched her cheek as she ducked beneath the bar and took shelter under a shelf of glasses.

"Hello," said a cheerful, surprised voice.

Donna screwed her eyes shut and told herself that she was just imagining it.

"Donna, that's it," the voice continued. "How's life treating you? Trip going well?"

It was impossible to ignore someone so determined to chatter despite the screams and lasers only a couple of feet away, but Donna was going to give it a bloody good try.

It was all his fault. The Doctor. An entire lifetime of no aliens, no strangeness and after one day with him the entire world seemed filled with them.

"I don't suppose you saw a small white cat out there?" the Doctor said, oblivious.

"Well, when I say a cat it's not really a cat, but cat shaped and fairly difficult to miss. Cats don't fly on Earth yet, do they?"

Donna risked opening her eyes and spotted the Doctor sheltering under her shelf about six inches away. He looked cheerful and excited, that stupid grin wider than anyone had a right to grin, and the pinstriped suit was wrinkled. In fact, he looked about the same as he had when he dropped her off all those months ago.

"You!" Donna said, loudly but trying not to shout. Too much. "What are you doing here?"

The Doctor shrugged and scratched the back of his head. "Trying to stop the Jareth soldiers flattening Ottawa? I'm told that it's very pretty here in the autumn and they really want their prisoner back."

"The cat?"

"The cat," the Doctor confirmed. "Have you seen it?"

"Why is there a flying cat on Earth? And why is it in this bar, with me, today?"

Not shouting was getting harder.

"That's a very good question," the Doctor said, "and I'll answer it as soon as we've caught the cat and stopped the Jareth shooting at everyone. Now, have you seen the cat?"

"No," Donna said. "Why would I have seen a cat in a bar that I was trying to get drunk in?"

"I don't know, you might have looked around a little," the Doctor said. "You know, big picture stuff."

That was when Donna decided it was much easier to shout at him, express her anger, and then help him find his bloody cat.

***

A herd of soldiers arrived at the bar just after the last Jareth soldier dematerialised with the little white cat that was apparently a mass murderer wanted for genocide on three planets. Who knew that genocidal maniacs could look so cute?

Donna glared as the soldiers rushed past her, shouldering her out of the way so that she stumbled into the wall just as she finally reached the exit. The Doctor, damn him, stepped out of the way smartly and before he could be run down. Apparently time-travelling aliens had excellent timing and balance because the Doctor looked like he had just been out for an afternoon stroll while Donna looked bruised, battered and dusty from the pummelling, crawling and ducking that she had been doing all afternoon.

"UNIT, Donna!" the Doctor cried happily. "It's good old UNIT come to save the day. Well, not really save because we've already done it. But tidy up the day, they're very good at that."

"What the hell is a unit?" Donna asked grumpily, massaging the shoulder that she had wrenched when the stupid cat hid behind jukebox.

"They're, well, they're UNIT," the Doctor said. "Tend to shoot at aliens a lot but brilliant when you can get them to think a little before pulling out the guns."

"Why weren't they here three hours ago, then?"

"They probably aren't based here," the Doctor said. "Canada doesn't tend to attract many alien invasion forces. Odd that, because the maple syrup is worth the fleet costs alone."

Darkness had descended in the hours since Donna had entered the bar. The quiet back street that had seemed so charmingly Canadian to Donna only a few hours ago was now filled with armoured trucks, soldiers, and searchlights. In fact, it looked like the aftermath of every other alien invasion that Donna had been involved with recently even down to the babble of different languages and the panicked police.

"Multi-national lot, are they?" Donna asked, nodding towards the nearest gaggle of uniformed men.

The Doctor ignored her and headed towards the chief soldier, a grey-haired man with half a dozen stripes on his shoulder and deep lines between his eyebrows. Donna sighed and followed, reasoning that if any more aliens appeared she did not want to lose track of the Doctor even if he was annoying, smug and another alien.

"Brigadier?" the Doctor asked.

The possible Brigadier looked up with a slightly annoyed expression. Donna guessed that it was an expression the Doctor saw directed towards him rather a lot. It was certainly proving to be her favourite expression.

"I'm Brigadier Pierce, sir," the Brigadier said warily. "And you are?"

"I'm the Doctor." The cheery grin didn't leave the Doctor's face as he held out some cards. "And this is my assistant, ah . . ." he checked the second card that he was holding " . . . Jo Grant."

The Brigadier took the ID, glanced at it, glanced at Donna and sighed heavily.

"I believe that Miss Grant left UNIT some thirty years ago, Doctor," he said.

"Oh," the Doctor said, slightly less cheerfully.

"You're nothing like your picture, but I'm told that's quite normal," the Brigadier continued. "We found your ship at the end of the street."

Nothing like his picture? Normal? Well, at least that confirmed that the Internet rumours were a bit more accurate than she had assumed. Somehow, a shape-changing time-travelling alien still felt safer than an Earth without the shape-changing time-travelling alien.

The Doctor beamed. "She's a little distinctive, isn't she?"

"What exactly happened in there?" the Brigadier asked. "I've got dozens of drunk civilians shouting about super-soldiers and there was apparently a cat. These things don't usually happen in Canada."

"You had a Jareth task force looking for an escaped prisoner," the Doctor said.

"And the cat?" the Brigadier prompted.

"Ah, well, the cat is a little harder to explain," the Doctor said.

***

Much, much later, as the sun started to peek over the rooftops of Ottawa, Donna and the Doctor slipped quietly away from the soldiers. It seemed only natural for Donna to follow the Doctor towards the TARDIS and she studied him as they walked. He still looked like an overgrown schoolboy with daft hair, but the haunted look had gone from his eyes.

"Did you find someone?" Donna asked quietly.

"Yes, I did," the Doctor said.

"And?"

"She needed a bit of time at home. You know, finish her degree, spend some time with her family," the Doctor said. "We were rather busy for a while and I think she needs a rest."

They stopped beside the TARDIS and Donna discovered an odd sort of fondness for the battered blue box even though it was this very blue box that had started the insanity of the last fourteen months.

"How about you?" the Doctor asked. "Did you really go travelling?"

Donna looked around the street, the stupidly tidy street of downtown Ottawa, and raised an eyebrow. "I'm not exactly in London anymore."

"Yes, well, people go on holiday all the time," the Doctor said. "That doesn't mean that they've actually travelled."

"I travelled," Donna said. "This was supposed to be my second to last stop. I was going to fly to New York and then go home."

"Oh," the Doctor said. He paused for a moment. "Well, then I suppose this is good-bye again."

"Take me with you," Donna said, so quietly she barely heard herself.

"What?"

Donna straightened up, thrust her chest out - good boobs could be a travelling girl's best friends when used right - and said, "Take me with you."

The Doctor's expression was unreadable. "I thought you didn't want my kind of life."

"I didn't," Donna said. "But I've got it whether I want it or not. You changed me, Doctor, forced me to open my eyes and it's bloody terrifying out here. Everywhere I go, things seem to happen: aliens and weirdness and things that shouldn't happen but do anyway. I'd go home except I'd probably find invading Martians or something. At least if I'm with you, there'll be someone around who knows what's going on and it won't just be up to me to make sure that people don't die."

"Oh, Donna," the Doctor said softly.

"Sometimes I think I hate you," Donna continued. "I liked the way things were. It was easy. I didn't really have to think because I knew what my life was and everything made sense."

"Would hating me help?" the Doctor asked.

"Not really," Donna said. "Seems a bit pointless, to be honest. It's not going to change anything, is it? So I was thinking, if I go with you then all this weird stuff will still happen but you'll be there to sort it all out. Please?"

The Doctor seemed to search her face intently for a minute and Donna was reminded that the cheerful, silly, manic man in front of her could also be darker and scarier than some of the aliens she had met over the last year.

"Alright then," the Doctor said, suddenly shaking himself into a happy mood. "Where do you want to start?"

He pulled out a little key and unlocked the TARDIS, gesturing for Donna to enter.

"My hotel," Donna said immediately. "Your what?"

Her footsteps clanged on the metal walkway in the control room and Donna thought that the lights seemed to brighten slightly, almost like the TARDIS was smiling at her. "My hotel. I want my bags and I don't want to get stuck with the bill if you don't get me back before I was supposed to check out."

"Well, if you-"

"And we could get breakfast while we're there," Donna continued, deciding that taking charge was probably the only way with the Doctor. "You probably don't have anything worth eating in here if you've been without company for a few days. No wonder you're so skinny."

"I have-"

"They have eggy bread and maple syrup," Donna said, enticingly. "It's weird, but it tastes good."

"Well, when you put it that way . . ." the Doctor said.


End file.
